My Journey With Bansuri

Summers are picking up here in India, and so is the heat. You do not feel to do much now in this season. You just want to lay around, being lazy. Well, hopefully, my previous posts have been useful to aspiring flautists like myself. Today, I shall share with you how to produce the notes. One of the most important lessons as far as any musical art is considered. What is an octave??? This word is commonly used in the western music. We use the word Saptak in India. So what is a Saptak after all?? A Saptak can be defined as a set of all succeeding notes starting from Sa. Hence, none of the notes are repeated in a Saptak. There are three main octaves(Saptak). Mandra Saptak ( Lower Octave) Madhya Saptak (Middle Octave) Taar Saptak (Higher Octave). Uptil what notes and octave a performer is able to perform is known as his range. For Hindustani Sangeet vocalists, the range is around 3 to 3.5 octaves. For instrumentalists, this range is dependent on the instrument. Bansuri has a ...

Hello Musicians, I seriously feel like I have successfully teleported to some different world, whenever I heard music. Especially Hindustani Shastriya Sangeet (Indian Classical Music). No music is above or below another. Although, the effect that this particular music generates is something which I cannot explain. I just love it. In this post, I will share the instance when I first touched that magic. I had started playing flute after my father gifted me my first one. He knew that I wanted to play the Bansuri. It was of the scale of C small. I tried very hard to produce good sound. When I started blowing into it, I had not read or seen or heard anything about how to play. I was totally unaware about any such lessons. I just picked it up and started blowing. One of good things about the small scale Bansuri is that you will be able to hear atleast something other than the hissing of your air blow. But, it requires too much power to continuously play the small scale instrument. S...

Is it not amazing, how a small piece of bamboo, with lots of holes on it, can be used to create music so divine and peaceful?? I sometimes just cannot stop thinking about those people, and their level of intellect, who first discovered music, the notes, and all those combinations. How were they able to do it?? Who taught them?? We might not have answers to all, but, whatever it is, it is mesmerizing. Let us push the boat forward in the ocean and know the first practical lesson on Bansuri playing. I have not learned anything directly from a Guru so whatever I know, is from my own mistakes. To begin with, let us learn how to hold the Bansuri. If your fingers are decently long, i.e. of medium length, you would be able to hold the G Natural Meduim Scale flute comfortably. The most used fingering technique is the one propagated by the legendary Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia. You can easily notice that the holes of the Bansuri are covered with the pads of the fingers and not the f...